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City of Gods Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city. I cluck my tongue at sun & sky. The sky rises too steeply. My soul goes no higher than the highest highway billboard. Oh Pericoli on a boat, a Mongoose, a motorcycle—you can’t draw the gods of New York from New Jersey. Just across the cosseted alley they sit: the gods in the dark, eating fishsticks. The best god I ever saw is my mother named Betsy. Then-a-days, in the blackout of ’77, from my roof I could feel the gods sweating and moving. Some got trapped in elevators, some got into black clothes & looted the glass-front stores. No one was whispering Icarus! Phaethon! Glory glory golden! I waited—to open my eyes and see my shy mother leaning over me. I could feel dark stacked mortar, higher than the sun. I was great & complete in that stack. The dark. The worldly world. The doth corrupt of Augustine doth. I am corrupted by the beautiful sweating & moving. Did you hear the divine shuffling across soft tar, the gods going toward the girls sleeping out on the roof? The gods felt like soft sootfall in my ears then. The world is never too much with us, said the ash. Go back down into the dark rooms, said the ash, ask Giovanna if her mother still loves me. I was a girl and a fleck of rust then. I was a girl and a poorly lit room. On the roof, I was a clothesline thief trying on camisoles, graying camisoles hung out to dry between the antennae, and a god in a window across the way would watch me. 12 Window dweller, god of spaces stacked with newspapers, god of walks home from the N as the light ends, if I ask you to turn my sooty camisole into wings and me into an industrial moth, I am asking to be man-made— I don’t want to be too much more than ashes anymore. 13 ...

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